Two years ago we shared five covers of women standing over men they had just killed and mentioned that there were many examples in vintage cover art of that particular theme. Today we’ve decided to revisit the idea in order to reiterate just how often women in pulp are the movers and shakers—and shooters and stabbers and clubbers and poisoners and scissorers. Now if they do this about a billion more times they’ll really be making a difference that counts.

French publishers, interestingly, were unusually fond of this theme—so egalitarian of them. That’s why many of the covers here are from France, including one—for which we admit we bent the rules of the collection a bit, because the victim isn’t dead quite yet—of a woman actually machine gunning some hapless dude. But what a great cover.

We also have a couple of Spanish killer femmes, and a Dutch example or two. Because we wanted to be comprehensive, the collection is large and some of the fronts are quite famous, but a good portion are also probably new to you. Art is by the usual suspects—Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips, Alex Piñon, Robert Bonfils, Robert McGinnis, Rudolph Belarski, et al. Enjoy.

There’s no safe place in pulp—especially not the bathtub. Above and below is a collection of vintage covers featuring various unfortunates who chose the wrong time to be naked and defenseless. Well, most of them are naked. A few have clothes on for reasons we cannot discern. Art is by Willard Downes, Barye Phillips, Robert Bonfils, Jef de Wulf, and others. See another good example here.

Cough, cough, hack, wheeze. We’re back from oblivion. Above you see the front and rear covers of Joe Castro’s Satan Was My Pimp, 1964, from Playtime Reading, with art by Robert Bonfils. This is of course one of the great sleaze titles ever. 

We were going to go with “cream for my seeping bacne” for the subhead on this one, but that struck us as too colloquial, so we went with hemorrhoid cream instead. We’re all class around here. Anyway, Curt Aldrich, who we last discussed way back in 2009, was a house pseudonym inhabited by several writers, so we hear. The only one of those to have been positively identified is Richard Curtis. The Lust Lotion, which appeared in 1967, is a tame effort for Aldrich. He would go on to write incest books like Spread Big Sister and Her Father’s Fixation, as well as bestiality novels like Daughter Loves Horses, Horse-Happy Schoolgirl, and the unforgettable Schoolgirls Hot for Dogs, so Lust Lotion is family fare in comparison. The art is from Robert Bonfils. 

According to Robert Bonfils’ website this is an example of his early work. We find it surprising, but there can’t be a more authoritative source (though that source has been neglected for years). Anyway, since the last Bonfils pieces we showed you were quite racy we thought we’d present his other side. This cheerful and classy LP sleeve for Dinah Washington’s Blazing Ballads is from 1952.

If you ever needed proof no subject was taboo for Greenleaf Classics, this is it. 1970’s Viet-Nookie was written by James L. Brown under his pen name L.J. Brown for Greenleaf’s Candid Reader line, and we can just imagine Greenleaf honchos William Hamling and Earl Kemp going back and forth: “No, we can’t.” “Yes, we can.” “No, we can’t.” "Yes. We can.” More likely, they both thought it was a great idea. Later in 1970 the two would go too far and be convicted of obscenity for distributing a book called Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which was an illustrated send-up of the actual federal report of the same name. But that’s another story entirely. The art here is by Robert Bonfils, by the way, and you can see more of his genius here and here.

We love this cover for pseudonymous author J.X. Williams’ The Transient Sinner, with its overheated tones surrounding a dark femme fatale with cold blue eyes and a hot and bothered pose. The art is by Robert Bonfils, and it’s a particularly successful effort. We’ve collected quite a few Bonfils covers that have been seen only rarely online and we’ll get those up pretty soon.